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I imagine that's a lot easier said than done, let me tell you a sad tail, a long time ago there was this project that forked off from the GIMP originally called film Gimp and is now called cinepaint [cinepaint.org] and that happened about version 1.3 for the GIMP. It different from the gimp because it was designed movies with big honking frames at 32 bit color depth, and I'm not talking 8+8+8 = 24 bits, were talking 32 * three color channels! So when the UI gets bloated it really bogs the whole system down. Cinepaint is currently undergoing a rewrite of the core to better support high color depth images and undergoing a change in the UI from GTK to FLTK. What they should have done was first separate the UI code from the program logic and made sure very thing still compiled and worked, then changed from the increasingly bloated, slow and ugly GTK to the still ugly but small and fast FLTK. What the Gimp team needs to do is get their code-Nazi's to finish the GEGL [gegl.org] overhaul and then separate the code for the user interface so it can be worked on without FUBARing the whole project. The other problem that the GIMP has is the GTK, Gimp Tool Kit that they wrote for the gimp is now integral with gnome so whatever evils gnome introduce the GIMP inherits and there is a limit to what they can fix.

The market has spoken. Given that the GIMP does nearly everything that Photoshop does, and costs nothing, but hasn't managed to displace it, then just clone the damn Photoshop UI. It's not a difficult concept.

Nearly everything? I doubt it. The GIMP can do a lot, but it doesn't come close to matching the functionality of Photoshop. According to the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:

Comparison with Adobe Photoshop

Like Photoshop, GIMP features support for 8-bit per-channel images. Its Intelligent Scissors are similar to Photoshop's Magnetic Lasso tool, and many basic tools and filters have identical functionality in both.

Photoshop features several advantages in color management. It has support for 16-bit, 32-bit, and floating point images,[10] support for the Pantone color matching system, or spot color and support for color models other than RGB(A) and greyscale, such as CIE XYZ.[11] Photoshop features extensive gamma correction support.

GIMP features no or (with the PSPI plug-in) very weak support for plugins designed for Photoshop, such as 8BF filters.[12]

In addition, Photoshop contains several productivity features and tools not supported by the GIMP, such as native support for Adjustment layers (layers which act like filters),[13], undo history "snapshots" that persist between sessions, the history brush tool, folders in the layer window, a free transform tool to rotate, scale and move in one tool, and an interpolation code to draw smooth brush strokes using a tablet. The GIMP also requires basic programming knowledge to build an automation upon it, usually Script-Fu (scheme) or Python-Fu, while Photoshop can record your actions and repeat them with a "Play" button.

The GIMP's open development model means that it is much more readily available at low or zero cost than Photoshop, on more operating systems, and plugin development is not limited by developers; by comparison, access to Adobe Photoshop's SDK requires authorization.

So, it seems like the GIMP is just barely scratching the surface of what Photoshop can do...

Photoshop also has excellent text tools, compared to the rudimentary tools in GIMP, and the excellent "Save for Web" feature, which makes it easy to compare the size and quality of png, gif and jpg options for your image exports.

Photoshop kills Gimp on performance for images greater than 3k x 3k pixels. I don't know what the deal is, but Gimp crawls when trying to touch up large images. Things like the airbrush seem relatively unaffected by size in Photoshop, but not in Gimp. And to say that Gimp's scissor tool is the same as the one in Photoshop would be a farce.

Yes, this is something that harder to explain or take a screenshot of, but it it 90% of the reason professionals who have tried GIMP won't use it. Adobe has spent almost

GIMPShop supposedly copies the Photoshop UI. I still didn't like it. For Windows and Mac, I don't think it's competing against the pay version of Photoshop, GIMP is competing against the infringing copies ("free"/"pirated") version of Photoshop.

I don't even think it's about copying the UI. I don't think people mind different UIs, but I think they mind having to use less efficient UIs. I don't think the UI designers for GIMP really thought that one through. I counted the number of steps it took to perform an action for the actions I often use, and Photoshop beat it. That's not even counting the vertical menu thing in GIMP. I don't know how other people are, but for me, moving the mouse cursor side to side is more efficient than up and down, and the vertical menu has just been more irritating than the standard horizontal menu bar, even if the horizontal menu bar drops down to a short vertical menu.

When having lots of toolbars, MDI applications (like Photoshop) are so much better than SDI applications like GIMP, because they don't clog up the taskbar and fill as much or as little of the screen as you desire.

Sure, as long as you are using a broken window manager (read: windows) without virtual desktops.

If a program wants to appeal to "the masses," it has to offer decent Windows support unless it's some obscure networking/analysis tool intended for the geek masses (they'll happily read the manpages and use the command line or really bad interfaces, as long as it gets the Job done well and is fast). Decent Windows support doesn't mean coding like "If Windows were better and adhered to the 'Linux UI standards,' this wouldn't be such a pain to use," but to look at the Windows Interface Guidelines and code acc

I still don't get it. When you have virtual desktops, the whole desktop is an MDI.You have the 800 window problem if you're using another type of MDI anyway, it's just that they're contained in another window. Same problem, pushed down a level.

And the latest version of the Gimp lets you dock any window that you want, so you can tab between commonly used tools. I find it quite flexible.

The only problem I really see is that there aren't typically shortcuts for everything, so there are extra clicks if you w

You have the 800 window problem if you're using another type of MDI anyway

No, you don't. You don't have 800 items on your taskbar, you don't have 800 different items clogging your alt-tab hotswitch menu, you don't have multiple copies of the same basic OS menu, you don't have 800 different places for the focus to be. And most of all -- most insanely! -- you don't switch to another application, then switch back to the original app only to find that each window has to be brought to the foreground individually. Because after all, they are not windows of a single application, they're 800 separate applications!

Sensible applications, built by people with UI experience, make toolbars and palettes behave like toolbars and palettes, not like completely separate applications. There are a number of different ways to approach this problem, all of which are superior in almost every manner to what the GIMP team has implemented.

If GIMP really wants to clone Photoshop, just allow for 3rd party skinnable UI's and allow "the community" to do the dirty work. It'll be one of those whack-a-mole type things for Adobe's lawyers to try to deal with... and once something is out on the internet, it's pretty hard to kill.

Of course it's not the ONLY Linux app I've ever tried. Do you honestly believe that there are people out there who would (or even could) do that to themselves?

You can call it biased and inflammatory if you want, but it's a perfect example of taking something beautiful and well engineered, copying it, and making something that's almost unusable.

I couldn't believe how bad simple things like wheel acceleration and fonts were.

I don't doubt that it was fun for you, but this is something for people who want to run Linux on their toaster. Once you remove the novelty of that, there's no there there.

iPod Linux might be a particularly bad case, but it's typical of FOSS.

If you're not happy with my iPod example, how about OpenMoko [openmoko.org]? It's like somebody went out of their way to make an iPhone clone that totally misses the point.

To be fair - I haven't used the latest versions of Open Office, Gnome, KDE, so maybe things have changed dramatically in the last year or so, but my experience with iPod Linux was absolutely typical and representative of my experience with other open source software.

Developers make shoddy, half-assed copies of closed source software and then bitch and moan when somebody points out that it's a poor imitation that totally misses the point. It's the user's fault! We're just biased against Linux!

It's probably no coincidence that the one piece of open source software I have used (and actually continue to use on a daily basis) with a UI that doesn't suck is Eclipse. In addition to having solid commercial roots, I'm sure that its quality stems in no small part from the fact that it's used primarily by developers (and even then, it leaves some things to be desired).

You say yourself that you're a longtime Linux user - well I'm sorry, but there's your problem. You're too close to this to see it clearly. You are by definition someone who is willing to put open source ahead of usability.

This is why I like OS X.

It's certainly not perfect but Apple has teams of people who sweat the small stuff. You can feel it - it permeates almost every aspect of the OS.

In the interest of equal time, it's also why I like Microsoft's Office 2007 Ribbons.

Somebody actually went out and did usability testing, and measured things like how long it takes a novice or expert to perform a given task. They moved things around, played with it, and spent a lot of time and effort on things that most of the FOSS community seems to think are hardly an afterthought.

Just for emphasis - I'm not against open source.

In fact, I would argue that by being realistic and pointing out things that can and should be fixed, I'm doing more to promote the use of FOSS than someone who turns a blind eye and pretends that it's all wine and roses.

The problem is that Gimp doesn't do everything Photoshop does, or even come close. There's no 16 or 32 bit channel support, no adjustment layers, no colorspaces aside from RGB and greyscale, no usable colour profile support. Those four things on their own eliminate Gimp as a usable high-end photography tool. The interface is not the problem. The underlying libraries are.

Krita from the Koffice suite is far more modern. It has all four of the above capabilities I mentioned. Some more polish and it'll be a very capable tool.

I agree. GIMP's interface isn't the problem. I've only used Photoshop and GIMP a little, but even a basic user like me can tell that Photoshop is much more powerful.In both GIMP and Photoshop, I can add a drop shadow to a layer. But with Photoshop, I can make all kinds of adjustments to the shadow (angle, opacity, spread, etc) and see it updated in real time. When I edit the layer, (e.g. cutting away parts of it, moving it around) the shadow is instantly updated. In GIMP, the shadow just sits there doing no

There's no 16 or 32 bit channel support, no adjustment layers, no colorspaces aside from RGB and greyscale, no usable colour profile support. Those four things on their own eliminate Gimp as a usable high-end photography tool. The interface is not the problem. The underlying libraries are.

it's funny because even a year or two ago when a GIMP article would come up, people would ask why it hasn't replaced Photoshop and I'd say that the primitive (well, it would have been state of the art in 1993) color support just kills it out of the box for anyone doing anything more advanced than web graphics. Of course, everyone would reply and say I was just a luser artist who was obviously just too stupid to possibly learn anything other than the Photoshop UI and that's why I secretly hated the GIMP, and no regular user will ever need to use anything other than 8-bit untagged RGB.

And of course now consumer-level cameras -- point and shoot $500 models -- are shooting in RAW and saving 12-bit tagged images that the GIMP has no hope of dealing with in any usable way.

If the GIMP developers had listened to the professionals back in say, 1999, when we told them their fundamental assumptions about color were hopelessly naive, they might have been able to do something about it. As it is, I don't imagine anything short of a Mozilla-style "throw out all the code and start over" will keep the GIMP from eventually fading away as more modern open-source apps port the GIMP's features onto a better foundation.

The market has spoken. Given that the GIMP does nearly everything that Photoshop does, and costs nothing, but hasn't managed to displace it, then just clone the damn Photoshop UI. It's not a difficult concept.

But doing something remotely practical like that would first require the GIMP developers having to admit they made a mistake; I pointed the mistake out to the developers over 2 years ago and even went so far as to draw mock ups of a new, better gui. I was quickly abused on the irc channel, kicked and then banned. If that is how the GIMP developers react to contributions then they can take their blog, roll it into a tiny roll and cram it.

This is, however, a symptom of a bigger issue; programmers failing to realise that they're programmers and failing to listen to usability people; let the usability experts design the interface - heck, there are tools to allow the separation between the two; then glue them together at the end. Let each team work on the area which they're good at. Admitting your weaknesses doesn't make you a bad person, it makes you an adult who understands what their limitations are.

But how much do usability experts charge for their services? And are they willing to allow their work to be distributed under a free license?

There are plenty of professional UI & usability folks happy to help. Developers, by and large, don't want to hear from us. We can't program and provide them with a neat patch to merge into CVS, so that means all we can do is give them more work to do, and in the process criticize what they think was a good design of their own making.

Also, many, many programmers have a clear disdain for anything as nontechnical and nonobvious as usability, since most usability research is experiential and similar to psychological research. I can't tell you the mathematical explanation for why people respond to particular elements or cues the way they do, all I know is that they do.

Part of the developer contempt for usability/UI folks (as can be seen on any UI thread on slashdot) is that programmers generally can't differentiate between mere aesthetics and taste and actual usability or UI mechanics. Changing the color of an icon or making something "pretty" has nothing to do with usability or UI design, but those sorts of things are generally used as a way to dismiss any criticism of an UI. "We just updated the icons, what do you mean our UI isn't modern!??" or "The program kicks ass, anyone who needs pretty buttons to use it is obviously too dumb to understand what it does"

Yeah, when I hear the words "GIMP UI Redesign" I have a similar thought.

To put it another way, you have a market that is dominated by a product, and the reason that product is dominant is because people like it, and not because of vendor lock-in. Even if you wanted to innovate, wouldn't it make sense to begin with copying the strengths of the existing dominant product? If you wanted your project to attract users, wouldn't you want to make sure that you were replicating the positive features of the compet

I think you are confusing "most" with "most vocal (and wrong)" because those of us that use Gimp and are under no illusion about the relative merits of the two offerings have no claims to make ergo we don't make them.As many people here are already saying, the UI is not what's holding GIMP back. The UI is the thing that stops PShop users even taking the time to find out what's missing. And why would they?

There was a time when everyone I knew had photoshop installed. I never did, just because I failed to see why I should install such a huge program for the kind of trivial image editing I was doing at the time (not because of some moral high ground I hasten to add, I just didn't want it). Most of my image editing needs nowadays are served by paint.net, or gimp, or if I need graphs, Gnu R

I hate GUIs too, and you can be sure I'll be lobbying for a command-line-only interface for the Gimp. It might have a steep learning curve, but can you imagine how powerful and efficient that would be?

I hate GUIs too, and you can be sure I'll be lobbying for a command-line-only interface for the Gimp. It might have a steep learning curve, but can you imagine how powerful and efficient that would be?

And to demonstrate just how powerful it is, the server-side of my chess diagram composer [jinchess.com] is a PHP script whose entire function is to create a single ImageMagick command that draws the chess diagram (and pass the result to your browser). Even the piece sets are (pre)rendered from TTFs using ImageMagick.

The GUI they use now would have been great on Mac Classic, where all an application's windows were on the same layer and there was only one application menu at the top of the screen. (In fact, this is what Photoshop looked like when it was originally developed for Macintosh.) The reason this worked is because when you switched from one application to another, ALL of the first application's windows moved behind ALL of the second application's windows... applications were in their own "layer."

This no longer applies. OS X doesn't do it. Windows doesn't (and never did) do it. Linux GUIs don't (and never did) do it. GIMP is using a 1984 GUI model in the modern era, and it's simply not working. (Personally, I liked Mac Classic's model, but I'm also pretty good at coping with reality when things change.)

Even worse, each of the GIMP windows have menus in them, leaving you in that mysterious position of not being to figure out exactly which ones are supposed to be palettes and which are supposed to contain the image. (Especially when you, as a new user, first open the program.) To make things even worse-worse, GIMP used to have two seperate File menus, one of which was actually used to open an image file, and the other one... totally different.

So my first suggestion is for GIMP to implement its palettes like virtually every modern application does. Paint.NET would be an excellent model on Windows... its palettes can exist happily in the main window, or outside it, but it's always clearly obvious which windows are palettes. (Don't use the Macromedia/Dreamweaver Flash example, which constantly pisses me off.)

Secondly, and this is a major change that will probably take a few revisions, but ditch your widget library. GTK, I believe. It requires a seperate application package on Windows, which gives the user a headache for virtually no benefit. It requires that the Mac OS X port run in X11, which is a usability nightmare on Macs. (And has irritating bugs on Mac that never seem to get addressed and/or fixed: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391461 [gnome.org] has been a thorn in my side for a year now, and it's still "unconfirmed.")

But what GIMP really needs is lots, and lots of development. This means community-building, the way the Firefox team did before the release of 1.0. GIMP needs a totally new UI, it needs a ton more features if it desires to be competitive with Photoshop, and it needs the community with the size and activity to make this happen. Right now, GIMP development is glacial. (My first suggestion would be to change the name, so people could say in public "I work on GIMP" without being laughed at or feeling embarassed.)

To those who are moving in from Photoshop, and would like a similar looka and feel, provide a skin for them. For the true GIMP pros, assuming they exist - retain the existing stuff. And so on. Compared to the size and complexity of code handling images, the UI bit should be miniscule... atleast I suppose so.

GIMPShop - a Photoshop-like skin for those who feel more comfortable with a Photoshop-like skin than the better (IMHO) GIMP skin. But that's just me. I'd like to see some added functionality, to be honest - such as a thumbnailer which outputs to HTML. Read: Irfanview.

Better suggestion: fix the underlying engines; 16 bit support, proper cmyk, non-destructive adjustment layers [kde.org], better text handling. While they're at it, ditch GTK for QT for better cross-platform behaviour so that Mac users can ditch X11 and Windows users can have better reliability. The nasty interface can be lived with, and while not Photoshop is better than some (many?) of the alternative commercial packages. Even on Windows, it works pretty well as an image-VI, when you need to quickly whack out a w

You know, for years I've been listening to people complain that the Free Software and Open Source communities don't ever invent anything on their own. That they simply re-implement other peoples' ideas. I think it's kind of ironic that the number one suggestion for the future of the GIMP is that it be changed such that it simply re-implements other peoples' ideas.

You know, for years I've been listening to people complain that the Free Software and Open Source communities don't ever invent anything on their own. That they simply re-implement other peoples' ideas. I think it's kind of ironic that the number one suggestion for the future of the GIMP is that it be changed such that it simply re-implements other peoples' ideas.

I think you're hearing from two different sorts of people. The people who vaguely insist that free software to do something new and inventive, without having any idea of what that "inventive" thing might be, are probably developers who don't use the software. There seems to be a lot of OSS developers who think that the most important thing for software to do is something "cool" and "inventive", which is usually geeky.

The people who use the software, on the other hand, usually just want the software to work in easy, predictable, and efficient ways. They want the software to have all the features they need, and have it be simple to use those features in their own workflows without needing some kind of specialized knowledge for that software.

When "Free" and "Open" software succeeds in that, you'll usually find that people start using it.

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" - Charles Caleb Colton in "Lacon" (1820).On slashdot we spend an incredible amount of time discussing all the ways corporations *don't* give their customers what they want. It seems that sometimes we tend to forget that at their base, companies still 80%+ of their time think "You're willing to pay for that feature? Let me see what I can do about that." If a feature is in Photoshop, you can bet it's been through a business case and it's either been proposed by gr

I'd be risking more psycho mails in my inbox if I posted under any of my usual accounts, so I'm posting this anonymous, even at the risk of it being modded down as a troll.

GIMP people, the biggest, quickest thing you can do to get good people back in the project and working well together is to finally, please, finally get rid of Carol Spears. I know 80% of you agree with me and have demonstrated in private to me or in public that you want her out, but she's pushing more and more people out with her weird shit, her stalking behaviour, her willingness to criticize anyone contributing to the project for insane reasons like stealing her boyfriend or taking her life from her, or accuzing people of having sex with conference organisers to sway them and obtain cash. Whatever, too many good contributors are sick of it. Yes, she has mental health issues, but the project has suffered too much accomodating those. There is only so much you can do for her.

Sorry, but you are wrong. According to what I read on the mailing lists and what I see in the ChangeLog files, Carol does not contribute to open source. She had started a redesign of the web site several years ago, but then gave up and others had to pick up the pieces that she left behind (of course she accused the others of "destroying her work" after she quit but this is a different story). I have not seen any significant contribution from Carol

Agreed. I think Firefox's success is at least 50% attributable to the fact that it sounds exciting.

"Gimp" on the other hand sounds like an insult, something inferior, and It rhymes with pimp -- and not in a good way. I have no desire to ever speak that word to anyone. They will never get word of mouth marketing from me.

This is by no means the only drawback that gimp faces, but it is a pretty major one. A great first step towards increased usage would be to change the name along with the UI redesign.

I know Slashdotters have been complaining about the name for years. But really, how much effort would you be willing to put into pressuring the authors to change the name?

I talked to them once. They think that you guys are lunatics and that they have absolutely no reason to listen to you. I even got banned [gnomesupport.org] for asking the question. So would you really be willing to do something about it, instead of just complaining on Slashdot?

Most of the games I've played lately let you completely reconfigure the keybindings to your liking. I don't understand why all software apps don't incorporate this. Yeah it could be confusing if you hop onto someone else's machine, but all you have to do is keep a copy of your keybind config file on a flash drive you carry around.

GTK and Gimp can do this for a long long time, you have to unlock it in the Gimp preferences (Interface->Use dynamic keyboard shortcuts), but once done you simply hover over a menu item, press the combo you like to assign to it and you are done with binding that item to the given shortcut, by far the easiest way to configure keyboard bindings I have ever seen anywhere.

That's simply not true. Retail versions of CS3 require activation, which discourages the casual pirate. A lot of businesses absolutely will not use pirated software.

If there were a free alternative to Photoshop that did everything Photoshop does as well as Photoshop does it, a lot of people would use it. Photoshop isn't cheap, and it doesn't "come with the computer" (which is how most people get Windows and Office).

There are a couple problems with GIMP. First, it's lacking some things like CMYK support. Also, it gives inferior quality in some cases. I've been in situations, for example, where I really needed to optimize JPEG quality for file size, and GIMP couldn't match the quality of Photoshop. Third, the name "GIMP" rubs professional users the wrong way. And finally, the interface isn't very good.

To anyone who works on the GIMP, I apologize if my post seems offensive. I think the GIMP is a very good program, but the reason professional graphic designers use Photoshop is that Photoshop really is a better program. Not everyone needs Photoshop, but if you do need Photoshop, GIMP might not be a good enough replacement.

I can't see what's wrong with basic layout of the program. OK, more customisable palettes would be good so I didn't have to keep torn-off menus lying around, but other than that I've no problem getting it to do what I want.

Except that there are multiple menu bars, one for every window. Right now with the multiple window model I don't think there's any other good way to do it... they might have to go to a single window model to fix it.

Also I think MS had something with Office where they removed most of the menus. The GIMP team should try and slim their menus up.

You can turn the window menu bars off in your preferences. You will then have only one menu bar - on the main toolbox. That was the original design, and I prefer it that way, but so many people were bitching that they want menu bars on every window, that the developers implemented it and made it the default. It's the first thing I turn off when I install GIMP on a new computer.

I was working at the cottage, which is linked to the outside world by a noisy party line, which allows me to run @ 15Kbps (ie 1/3 of normal dialup speed). The etiquette up north is that you can check your email for 10 minutes or so, and in any case even ssh over that kind of link is a bit choppy. So I booted my notebook into linux mode and coded against the centos server running lamp. I wanted to use the Gimp so I would not have to keep flipping between OSs. The Gimp turned out to be pretty good, at least f

Does anyone remember Krita?
URL: http://www.koffice.org/krita/ [koffice.org]
It's UI is consistent and easy to use - esp. from a newbie pov.
What else? a name change? No. GIMP gets advertising from the tonnes of people who TALK ABOUT GIMP and about its 'wrong name'. Tabs - maybe. Add it as an optional feature. Opening multiple instances of an image may tax your resources too much. Make it pleasant - like Visual studio is. No joke. It's intuitive, you get 1 window (add tabs if you want to), menus on top, icons, left pan

Yeah, considering the utter disregard for decent interface design on any level that the GIMP team has shown in the past, I'm not really holding out much hope for this one. Perhaps we'll get a new coat of paint on top of the old interface, but the whole thing will still be a horrid programmer-interface mess.

Or perhaps they will really create a competent design team and let them dictate every detail of the interface. But with the usual open source ego contests, that seems a tad unlikely.

Call me wacky, but the UI isn't a problem. Any tool can be learned in a few days or weeks of using it.

Instead, here's my wishlist:

icc profiles for display and printer

deep color (16bit/channel or deeper) and hdri color

better support for huge images in moderate memory

filter layer types

Being on Mac OSX, my top wish is for an updated Mac OSX build (even if it still must be under X11.app). The OSX-ready builds are far behind the main development releases, and for the glacial pace of GIMP development, that is really saying something. I bet all of the above items are ready on Linux, just not the officially recognized OSX-ready builds on macports or the website.

Amen! There is nothing major wrong with the GIMP UI. Of course there are number of small quirks that should be fixed, but besides that, GIMP interface is actually fairly similar to that of Photoshop - the original Mac version, that is. The problem is that lot of people are now using GIMP on Windows. Windows, in spite of its name, has no concept of windows management. Basically each application is supposed to manage its own windows. That's why there are all those weird multiple document interfaces on

That's what I mean! Windows has no concept of windows management. On Unix using Xwindow with a decent window manager, applications rarely open documents in a full screen window. Each application window is relatively small, and when it opens, the window manager places it such that it minimizes overlap with other windows, or by some other user configurable criteria. You can then easily maximize and un-maximize windows using the keyboard or mouse. You can even make windows grow in only one direction, or o

Instead of opening up Photosho.. err, GIMP and cranking out a bunch of comps that are just mashups of existing UI concepts, why not talk to your users and design around their workflow and needs? Good UI is not born in a vacuum, good user experience doesn't happen without talking to users. For an app that seems to have the Rodney Dangerfield complaint, the team around it seems to do little to counter that. (You think Adobe doesn't test the hell out of its apps?)

So, I'll throw one out there, in the interest of PRACTICAL feedback:Single window mode is a bad idea because it makes a photo retoucher's life much more difficult.

Here's an example why, an actual segment of a workflow and/or task, done in Photoshop to show the ease of this and why multi-window works well.

Grab a picture of a friend, ideally if they are drunk or have blotchy skin in the photo -- make it as unflattering as possible. Wedding pictures are ideal. Needs to be color.

Open it in Photoshop. Now, since I don't have another copy in front of me, this is the CS2 method:Window>Arrange>Open New Window for [foo.jpg]Window>Arrange>Tile Vertically

Now center both windows on the same area, ideally, said blotchy skin.

On ONE window, go to the layers/channels/paths palette. Switch to the Channels palette. Turn off all channels except green. Odds are, it looks pretty much like the color photo, just in B&W.

Now take the Clone tool and massage out some of the blotchiness in the green channel ("B&W") version. Ta-da, fixed in both. And you can see its effect immediately.

This is one way that your favorite babes are airbrushed to laughable non-human perfection for magazines. It's quick, it's got incredible feedback, and it's not possible in a tabbed or single window method.

Talking to your users, as opposed to a comp-off (or the cardinal sin, the designer assuming he knows everything), gives you all kinds of useful information like that.

What the above post is describing is what is fundamentally wrong with GIMP and why I don't use it, either. That problem is WORKFLOW. The UI *is* truly hideous and disuseful, but if the app is good enough, you go along with its weirdness.

A case in point in that regard would be the old Quark Xpress. For years it tortured people with parent windows and child windows, a truly clunky interface, and all manner of f*cked up weirdness. BUT: once you learned it, it TOTALLY rocked and was light years beyond Pagemaker, ReadySetGo, and all the other page layout apps, even when those apps were easier to use.

InDesign arrived, and was deeply bug ridden. Then they fixed it, and its workflow is sooo powerful and easy to use, as it is combined with a fairly rational UI, it's eating Quark's Lunch.

Workflow proceeds from fundamental capabilities - the above note demonstrates that clearly. But merely possessing them isn't good enough - it has to be in a UI that is familiar, especially when going up against the likes of Photoshop. There have been plenty of powerful apps with bizarro UI (Kai's powerTools, Metasynth, etc.) and their power often went untapped. So, the discussion of UI is relevant. However, the UI is of no value if the workflow is hampered by inferior basic features.

GIMP's support of CMYK is miserable. That needs to change. One should be able to INVENT colour spaces on the fly - an ability to make (x) colour separations. Multiple windows as above noted needs to happen. The tool palette is absurd and needs to be aligned with other apps in that market segment - heck PAINTER was/is more like Photoshop than GIMP, and it has a great interface and Painter's brushes are incredible.

Frankly, fixing the UI is a bit like putting lipstick on a pig. GIMP needs fundamental and architectural adjustments to its fundamental feature sets and workflow.

I don't care if it EVER runs on Windows or Mac - if done right, it could be a killer app for Linux (along with OO), and help put Linux over the top.

Quit screwing with the UI and add CMYK support. I'm not talking about some half baked script- real
CMYK support from the bottom-up.

It's on the way, and has been in process for quite some time. GIMP is getting an entirely new graphics engine called GEGL [gegl.org] that supports different colorspaces (incl. CMYK and all of the other widely-used spaces), 32 bit per channel color, support for adjustment layers, and a lot more.

I have around 400 gigs of Photoshop files. GIMP is completely and totally worthless to me until it can open and save every single last one of them (the vast majority having been created with Photoshop 5 or 5.5), including full support for all blending modes, masks, color modes, and fonts.

OpenOffice has.doc support. Why does GIMP's.psd support suck so much ass? The goal here shouldn't just be grabbing new users, it should be trying to sway or convert established, deeply entrenched users of other software. I can't use the GIMP not for any gui reasons (there's plenty of gui reasons, but if nobody used ugly or badly designed apps, then neither linux nor windows would have ANY marketshare) but for the simple fact that it doesn't open my damned documents. Even if I were to switch, I'd still have to keep PS around for working with my thousands of older documents.

The general attitude is "We're not going to change anything because even though the similarity of constant anecdotal 'complaints' may actually constitute user testing, we refuse to believe it until someone does systematic user testing." Of course, imgimp is the answer to their request, but automated testing does nothing. They're missing the point that assisted user testing is needed, where you give someone a mock up and ask them where they expect to find things, and how they expect to do things. What they've been getting, in droves, is people who are GIVING THEM THIS EXACT INFORMATION, in forums, in blogs, in wikis and slashdot posts. Things like "Why are script-fu and filters two different things?" and "what are Xtns?" not to mention "Why does the palette take up so much space?". Then there's the whole MDI/SDI thing. The horrible fact is that the GIMP is an MDI application. There is a shared set of tools that act on multiple document windows. Gasp. Unfortunately most X window managers have no idea what this means, and the concept of 'tool windows' is meaningless (i.e.: if I have 8 tool windows open, I have 8 task items in my task bar, and sometimes you have to click-to-focus and click-to-invoke on a non-focused window).

There are some very simple things the GIMP developers could do to fix the application:

Rename the damn thing. I'll say it again: would you suggest the GIMP to your grandmother? My grandmother wouldn't even visit 'excite.com', lest it turn out to be salacious. They should call it SPORK (the GIMP fork)!

use the existing preferences infrastructure to:

make the palette at least 2-column so it leaves more space for the document window

set the 'tiny' UI style to the default

make the 'File Xtns Help' menu a popup menu, and rename Xtns to something sane. Or; make them buttons that open popup menus

Reorganize the menus themselves to group common functionality. I don't care if it's familiar to photoshop users. I care if the menus make sense. move "Tools Dialogs Filters Script Fu" into a hierarchy that matches their function, and name them per their function.

Also, the entire "select" system is hard to grasp for people used to other programs. Not just photoshop. PhotoDraw, PhotoPaint, MacPaint... whatever.

Add layer grouping. Do away with new layer dialogs.

Group tools on the tool palette

in general look into shrinking the space taken up by the various palettes. On some screens fully half the layer palette is taken up with labels and buttons. God help me, but part of the reason Adobe has its own widgets is because the windows standard ones take up too much space. Except you have no excuse because GTK widgets were DESIGNED FOR THE GIMP AAAA!

For the love of God, do some paper testing.

Get real designers, and I don't care if they're familiar with Photoshop... hell, Adobe just redesigned the damn thing on us so it's not like we're shocked by the New. Get them and sit them down with paper mockups and ask them how to do common design tasks, common painting tasks, common editing tasks.

Admit that a lot of us have done this already ourselves. Sure a lot of it seems to you to be "oh that's just because they know photoshop", but damnit man, it's not photoshop we know, it's everything. Photoshop, MacPaint, ColorIt! (yeah, I said it), PhotoDraw, whatever. There is a common language to these tools and you keep trying to miss it just to be different.

Look again at this [lostgarden.com] [lostgarden.com]... especially the part about "All that touchy-feely junk is the main reason why people are bu

Seriously.. Also, if you can't do the widgets, at least have the decency to track (separately) last directory used for opening projects and saving images and use those by default in file open and save dialogs (Like most other windows programs). I imagine I'm not along, in that I keep my project files deep in one tree, while the images that are output are deep in another tree.. it's a pain in the ass to always have to go between them.

The only reason I use gimp is because it's free, not because I like it better. I've started putting the bug in my boss's ear about photoshop, because Gimp is just getting on my nerves.

Seriously.. Also, if you can't do the widgets, at least have the decency to track (separately) last directory used for opening projects and saving images and use those by default in file open and save dialogs (Like most other windows programs). I imagine I'm not along, in that I keep my project files deep in one tree, while the images that are output are deep in another tree.. it's a pain in the ass to always have to go between them.

The only reason I use gimp is because it's free, not because I like it better. I've started putting the bug in my boss's ear about photoshop, because Gimp is just getting on my nerves.

If you're stuck with using Windows, why not give Paint.NET [getpaint.net] a try? It's under the MIT License. The features are really good and it has a Windows-style UI. Personally I prefer GIMP's UI, though, for the reasons many people seem to hate it (I despise MDI, floating windows ftw).

Give it a try. It's really good and actively maintained. If it only worked under Mono...

I cant figure out freeserifsoftware.com - right next to the "Its all FREE!!!" "amazing VALUE!!!" banner there is a "buy online" banner. "Visit our AMAZING SHOP!!! Save $$$ where they try and sell you stuff that is also free? and have a ridiculously high "original price" discounted with ridiculous margins. Sorry, but the site alone hit many of my red flags.

wxWidgets always seems to be just as bad as a foreign toolkit in the apps that I've used it in. The interfaces always wind up being awkward and clunky.

I'd argue pretty strongly that GTK+ is the more versatile of the platforms. Pidgin feels pretty darn close to native on Windows. If you can come up with another toolkit that comes close, I'll retract my claim.

Firefox also does a great job, although I'd disqualify it for having tons of OS-specific code, not to mention a shitty Mac version.

There's already Krita [koffice.org] (part of KOffice, KDE) which uses Qt and looks and acts quite like Photoshop, so come KOffice 2.0, perhaps Krita will become the most popular open source image editor since it'll have native Windows and Mac ports.

You should also note that GTK stands for GIMP ToolKit as it was written as a widget toolkit for GIMP in the first place. I doubt they'll be changing it anytime soon.

I manage a small but successful wedding photography company. We use almost exclusively open source software including DigiKam, ShowFoto and of course, the Gimp.

I wanted people to switch to Krita for the deeper color support and integration with DigiKam and ShowFoto, but the thing is unusable! There (currently) aren't nearly as many editing tools while and the UI may look more like Photoshop, it's sure doesn't behave like it.

After about 2 weeks of trying to use it, I had to go back to Gimp and put Krita off for futher evaluation in a year or two.

Some things Gimp has going for it:

1) It works pretty well (not great, not all the features that Photoshop has, but good enough for many uses)2) The new 2.4 version is a huge improvement in usability (All color items in their own menu? Yes!, All special effects scripts in one place? , Yes!)3) The extensive set of plugins http://registry.gimp.org/ [gimp.org] which allow for added (and usually tested) functionality4) Enough people use it that most major bugs are squashed before a release is made

Switching to QT would be plain stupid. What however would be nice is the decoupling of the image manipulation functionality from the UI, so that not only different UIs would be easily doable, but most important of all, a no-UI mode would be possible. Currently is quite a a PITA to use Gimp on the command line, it somewhat works, but is far from being as easy to use at it should be and also not all of Gimps functions are accessible via scripting.And before somebody mentions ImageMagick, yep, that works, but

My recommendation is to run gentoo before saying things like that.
gtk is no walk in the park to compile, time-wise, but I guarantee you qt is a flipping nightmare to compile, such that I go out of my way to disable the qt* useflags. (Oh, yeah, and this is not a slow system, being a 2.4 GHz single core K8.)

This says qt is full of bloat relative to gtk. Why does gimp need so much cruft just to expose a window and some buttons? What gimp really needs isn't so much a UI redesign so much as native 16-bit component support (or dare we even ask for HDR?) now that everyone and his brother has RAW support on his camera.

Maybe its just full of useful classes? Assuming those classes are broken up into enough separate static and shared libraries, that does not translate into bloat for the qt programs.

Also GTK is only a graphics library. As opposed to QT, which has APIs for networking, database connections, etc. You can write conole programs in QT. Its about as easy as java or.NET, except you have to dofree whatever you new. So yes it will take longer to compile QT than GTK, but the real measure of bloat is would be if you wrote a simple text editor in QT and one in GTK, and made them both static executables, which executable would be bigger. Then you have to say which one was quicker to develop.

I never understood the point of these huge, monolithic libraries. They're a bitch to maintain & if you want to use an improved aspect in PART of the library (e.g. a better database interface), you often must upgrade ALL uses of the library that you might be happy with (e.g. the GUI). In Open Sources 2.0 [amazon.com], Chris DiBona states "when developing, I like to use large libraries only when I either don't want to deal with a technology, or I don't fully understand it and don't feel qualified to implement it." It seems that many *nix hackers feel similarly about userland tools. So why is QT so popular?

Well, first of QT is split into several sublibraries (as of 4.0), so it's not monolithic as such. As to why it is popular, try using it. It's popular because it is very well made. To the grandparent, QT takes longer to compile because it is C++, which is a language that is hard on the compiler. GTK, on the other hand, is written in C, which is very easy on the compiler. (Insert language flamewar here).